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Chapter 7: Sample
Web Projects |
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Introduction
> Learning Goals
> Teaching
Guidelines > Planning
Tips > Sample Web Projects > Conclusion The projects described in this section illustrate the ways that
teachers are using the Internet in a variety of contexts. The
examples include five from K-12 schools and five from universities.
Primary School Webfolios Topics and tasks for the portfolios corresponded to the specific
elements of a portfolio recommended by the national English Inspectorate
of Israel. For example, fifth graders are expected to copy correctly,
so the students were asked to copy a jazz chant from their course
book. Students are expected to be able to express their feelings
in English, so they created a table of their likes, hates, and
wants. For a piece of factual writing, students were asked to
describe the weather. Students pursued a variety of strategies in creating the elements
of their Webfolios. Some wrote directly on the screen, and others
prepared their writing at home. Students also had free rein to
choose the backgrounds and fonts for their sites from among those
that the teacher had preselected and downloaded onto a graphics
page. Arenstein feels that the project has tapped students' multiple
intelligences well. Students can use their artistic skills to
design the pages, their writing skills to create the texts, and
their interpersonal skills to plan the pages with their classmates.
They are highly motivated, and they are learning English and computer
skills simultaneously. A downside to the project is that it takes
a good deal of time for the children to master the computer skills
and carry out the tasks. Arenstein plans on continuing the Webfolio
project, and she hopes that the children develop more creative
sites after they complete some of the preliminary projects. A Primary School E-Mail Cultural Exchange D'Eça located Glenn Rutland, a grade-grade teacher in
Florida, in the United States, who was interested in carrying
out a student exchange. The two teachers corresponded by e-mail
in September to plan for the e-mail exchange, carefully coordinating
the objectives (see Figure 3), activities,
and logistics. They chose a number of topics for the exchange,
including Christmas decorations, shopping, and the meaning of
Christmas. The project itself began in October and lasted until
early January. Students in each class were assigned to groups of five; students
of different language levels were intentionally mixed. Students
then corresponded group to group, first writing basic messages
introducing themselves and then addressing the specific Christmas-related
topics. D'Eça taught her students vocabulary that would
be helpful in the letters. The students then worked on their messages
during class in groups, with d'Eça assisting as needed.
The Portuguese students were only in their second year of English
and needed a lot of help. As d'Eça put it, "I always
had 5-6 students around my desk, so I used to say that I looked
like a mother chicken with all the little chicks around her"
(personal communication, July 1999). The class had no access to computers during the school day but
could use three or four school computers after school. Volunteers
from each group took turns staying after class once a week to
type the letters on a computer, with d'Eça providing additional
assistance as needed. She then sent the e-mail from her home computer
because there was no e-mail access at school. A highlight of the exchange was when John Glenn became the oldest
man ever in space. The Florida students witnessed the space shuttle
takeoff during a field trip to the Kennedy Space Center and excitedly
shared the news with the Portuguese students, who had watched
the event on television. D'Eça noted a great increase in her students' enthusiasm
for English as a result of the project. Their writing skills also
improved a good deal because of the extensive practice. And by
the end of the semester, the students had made good friends and
had even tried recipes sent by their keypals. At the end of the semester, d'Eça assembled the students'
messages into a book, which she placed in the library for others
to see. She also put up notices on bulletin boards to let other
teachers and students in the school know about the project and
book. In spite of the extra work that such projects take, d'Eça
is strongly committed to continuing them in the future. She plans
on doing one e-mail exchange project each year, tied to the particular
curriculum of the students in that year's course. A Middle School Web Publishing Project According to Kneirum (personal communication, March 1999), most
German students' writing experience is restricted to fill-in-the-gap
exercises and guided compositions. He and Mokry thus wanted to
give their students the opportunity to develop their skill in
writing for more natural and communicative purposes. At the same
time, they did not want their students to become overwhelmed,
so they began the project with exercises and tasks the students
were familiar with, moved to guided but independent tasks, and
ended by having the students working on their own with minimal
teacher control. Students had three writing assignments for the project. First,
they wrote a short summary of the book, making use of a teacher-prepared
worksheet with questions and useful expressions. The second writing
activity was more open and collaborative, with students working
in groups to develop their own ideas on a topic that built on
the book's story. For example, some wrote newspaper articles and
interviews about the characters, some wrote dialogues between
characters, and others wrote TV news reports based on the book's
events. Students spent much time editing, revising, and rewriting their
pieces. They were told from the beginning that their writing would
be published on the Web, and, according to Kneirum, this knowledge
greatly increased their motivation to write well. The writing
activities were complemented by other activities designed to foster
additional skills. Students were given the option of recording
audio or video versions of their written texts, and their work
on developing these entailed a good deal of pronunciation practice.
Students were also allowed to make their own Web sites and thus
gained design and authoring experience. Finally, they wrote personal
home pages that were included in the site. The entire project was completed in a room with one computer
for every three students. Although students sometimes had to wait
their turn, this encouraged them to work collaboratively and help
each other with their writing and Web design. On the final day of the project, the children visited each other's
Web sites and turned in their portfolios. Their grades for the
project were based on the quality of their written product (correctness,
creativity, and effort), their mark on a vocabulary test (based
on vocabulary from the book and on other expressions the students
had come across in reading and writing their essays), and an evaluation
of their portfolio, which contained all versions of their texts. According to Kneirum, the project was quite challenging for the
students because it imposed new expectations on them. Instead
of providing a teacher-centered classroom, the instructors demanded
independence. Instead of handing out worksheets, the instructors
expected creativity. And instead of working alone, as was usually
the case, the students were expected to work in groups. But the
fact that the students were working on their own projects to be
published on their own home page, which would be subject to public
scrutiny, brought out a great deal of motivation, commitment,
and creativity, and the students completed the project with great
success. A Junior High Virtual Classroom The majority of Jack's students use Internet connections at home
to access the virtual classroom. The highly interactive site includes
an announcement space, a message board, a forum, and a chat room
where Tseng and the students meet at designated times. The students
sometimes post their homework assignments on the forum and discuss
them on-line. On occasion, the class discusses the on-line activities
during the regular class period. The virtual classroom has a place
for students' Web pages and a link to a Taiwanese site called
Hello, where students can get free e-mail addresses. Tseng
looks forward to the opportunity to use computers more with his
students in school. In the meantime, he is glad that many of them
are able to practice their English after school in a virtual environment. A High School E-Mail Exchange Project Greenfield's students worked with a class of native English speakers
from Mt. Ayr Community in Ringgold County, Iowa, in the United
States. The exchange involved three elements: project-based learning,
cooperative learning, and process writing, none of which, according
to Greenfield, is regularly practiced in Hong Kong. Before the
exchange began, Greenfield taught her students to use these elements
with their regular textbooks and course materials. For example,
when the Hong Kong syllabus called for lessons on discrete grammar
skills, such as the use of negative statements or conjunctions,
Greenfield had her students practice the same grammar points in
meaningful collaborative writing assignments. Students became
comfortable with the kinds of project-based learning approaches
they would use with their U.S. partners. In the e-mail exchange, Greenfield's students worked with their
international partners on essays in two genres of academic writing,
descriptive essays and imaginative essays, which are mandated
in the Hong Kong curriculum. Together, the students then edited
and produced an anthology of student writing. As a first step, students exchanged personal letters, which served
as an icebreaker for the project. Students then worked in teams
at their own site to write descriptive essays about their community
setting, focusing on issues such as historical landmarks, tourist
sites, architecture, landforms, restaurants, and schools. The
students removed some words from the essays to turn them into
cloze exercises and sent the essays to their international partners,
who tried to fill in the blanks. At about the same time, students
exchanged by postal service cultural packets containing such items
as photographs of students and their families, menus from local
restaurants, coins, stamps, pictures of state birds and flowers,
and class videotapes and brochures about school and community
events. In the next stage, students worked in small groups at each home
school to propose topics for the imaginative essays. They then
negotiated by e-mail to narrow down the topics, finally selecting
the theme of entertainment. Within this theme, students could
choose a specific topic of their own interest. One student wrote
about life as a member of the Shanghai Acrobatics Team. Other
essays focused on the imagined life of a country-western singer
or a TV news presenter. Then, using a grading rubric developed by both teachers, students
employed peer-editing techniques, first in their home classes
and then with their international partners via the Internet. After
receiving comments from their peers in both locations, they discussed
how the essays could best be published as a student anthology.
Via Internet discussion, classes on both sides made editorial
decisions about the layout and content of the publication. According to Greenfield, the project had many benefits, including
giving the students a chance to develop their writing skills for
a real audience while developing the skills of long-distance negotiation,
organization, editing, revision, and editorial production. The
project helped students see English as a valuable tool for international
communication rather than only as a subject required for the national
examination. An Internet Research Project in an Intensive English Program Before the project begins, Hansen introduces basic vocabulary
and concepts related to stocks and investing. Students then form
groups in the classroom to tentatively plan their investment strategies.
They later meet in the computer laboratory, where they use Internet
search engines to locate information about the companies they
have selected. They also use the Internet to track stock prices. Hansen then introduces Web site design by asking students to
map a particular Web site that is already on the Internet. Students
look at one of several assigned sites and draw lines from the
main page to each document linked to that page. The class discusses
the nonlinear structure of the Web sites and analyzes the uniform
elements that appear across sites. Students then meet in groups to plan the Web site they will produce.
Hansen gives each group a list of required elements for the site.
For example, each group member must contribute two to three paragraphs
of content, each page should contain links to related information,
and the site needs to be interesting. Students are also taught
how to examine the source code of existing sites in order to learn
more about Web site design. Although each student learns all aspects
of authoring, in their teams they choose one principal role as
a writer, navigator, or designer. Most of the Web site design is done outside class. Hansen provides
some additional Internet resources to help the groups get started,
such as Web66: A K12 World
Wide Web Project or WebFX
(1999). The project culminates in oral reports on the project,
including presentations of the Web sites. A University-Level Content-Based Course Early assignments in the course included on-line readings (e.g.,
What's
the Internet?, R. S. Davis, 1998b) and links to enjoyable,
interactive Web sites (e.g., Totally
Free Stuff). Step-by-step, the students then learned to
search the Internet, send e-mail messages, join and participate
in e-mail discussion lists, and construct a Web page. During the
last 5 weeks, the students carried out a culture research project
(see R. S. Davis, 1998a, http://www.esl-lab.com/courses/project.html)
in which they use a variety of Internet sources to gather information
about a holiday in another country. The students' marks in the
course were based on their research paper, home page project,
attendance and participation, homework, and exams. Tests for the
course were also delivered through an on-line format on a password-protected
site; students were given the password on the day of the test. A University On-Line Writing Course In addition to the students who come to class sessions and also
participate on-line, about 10 students take the course entirely
on-line. This option provides another means of teaching writing
to students who, for reasons of schedule or disability, are unable
to attend class sessions. A University-Level Problem-Based Learning Course Students begin the course by doing Internet research on foreign
internship opportunities in their own field (e.g., engineering).
Having a specific goal in mind allows them to quickly hone their
Internet research skills. They use Internet search engines, on-line
employment centers, classified ads in on-line newspapers, and
company Web sites for their search. As they begin to identify
potential employers, students prepare CVs and cover letters. The
replies they receive from employers, together with other Internet
resources, form a corpus of authentic material that serves as
a platform for study and analysis, helping students improve their
writing of CVs, business letters, and e-mail messages. Because students are engaged in authentic and, to them, important
communication as part of the course, they are highly motivated
to identify weaknesses in their communication skills and seek
assistance. They learn to address these weaknesses with the help
of the teacher and through independent on-line research. According
to McGregor, the course helps students develop language and technical
skills as they work on a task important to their own future. It
has been most successful with third- and fourth-year students,
who have the requisite language skills and other background knowledge
to write a good CV and pursue an internship. A University Environmental Project Each group selected an environmental problem from a list of suggestions,
including nuclear power, wildlife preservation, noise pollution,
groundwater contamination, and exhaust pollution. Each group completed
and submitted a written portfolio consisting of an introductory
letter or CV, a report stating the importance of the problem,
a 3-year plan for tackling the problem, a budget outlining what
monies would be spent, a technical report recommending solutions
to the problem, a 250-word abstract for the Call for Papers for
the Fifth International Conference on Improving the Environment,
a record of the group's division of labor, and a 250-word essay
evaluating the course. Each student submitted the introductory
letter or CV and the essay; all the other items were team products. At the end of the semester, the students gave oral presentations
on the work completed in each class; in Finland, other students
and teaching staff and members of a sponsoring organization attended
the presentations. Students in each class also voted on the best
project, and the votes were tabulated so that overall winners
could be selected. The students' projects, together with student
evaluations, can be found at Environment
Activity (Vilmi, n.d.). A strength of the project was that it included a number of authentic, collaborative writing assignments in a variety of genres. However, coordinating the project among three different classes with different schedules created difficulties and slowed progress. In the end, students' evaluations of the project were mixed, with some feeling that it had been an exciting learning experience and others frustrated by the complications and delays. The teachers involved are continuing to organize other Internet-based projects in ways that can maximize the strengths of this effort and minimize some of the weaknesses (e.g., by addressing differences of scheduling and expectations during the planning stage).
Figure 3. Objectives of the Spirit of Christmas Cultural Exchange
Introduction > Learning Goals > Teaching Guidelines > Planning Tips > Sample Web Projects > Conclusion
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